Friday, October 26, 2012

A skeleton of a Viking has been
discovered by archaeologists at Llanbedrgoch, Anglesey. Scientists from
Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, who made the discovery believe
it will shed new light on the interaction between Celtic, Anglo-Saxon
and Viking-age worlds operating around the Irish Sea. The skeleton find is an unexpected
addition to a group of five (two adolescents, two adult males and one
woman) discovered in 1998-99. Originally thought to be victims of
Viking raiding, which began in the 850s, this interpretation is now
being revised. Tests by Dr Katie Hemer of Sheffield University indicates
that the males were not local to Anglesey, but may have spent their
early years (at least up to the age of seven) in North West Scotland or
Scandinavia.

The Llanbedrgoch site was discovered in
1994 after a number of metal detector finds had been brought to the
museum for identification. These included an Anglo-Saxon penny of
Cynethryth (struck AD 787-792), a penny of Wulfred of Canterbury (struck
about AD 810), and three lead weights of Viking type. Read the rest of this article...

Monday, October 22, 2012

The Anatomist Overtaken by the Watch by William Austin, 1773 (Image: Museum of London)

It is a tale of macabre fascination and ghoulish enterprise: the
rampant and horrific practice in early 19th-century London of snatching
dead bodies from fresh graves - or in some cases, committing murder - to
use the corpses for anatomical dissection. Nearly two centuries later,
these stories still serve as a reminder of the tension between medical
need and bodily autonomy.

Now an exhibition at the Museum of London adds new archaeological
evidence to our understanding of the “resurrection men”, the anatomists
they supplied and the occasionally blurry distinction between the two.
By balancing this evidence with a careful examination of the social
atmosphere, growing field of surgery and grimly simple equation of
supply and demand, Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men offers fresh insight into a discomfiting legacy.

“Whatever we may think of what happened at the time, there is that
question: was it for the greater good?” asks Jelena Beklevac, curator of
human osteology at the museum. Read the rest of this article...

For the past 50 years—since the discovery of a thousand-year-old Viking way station in Newfoundland—archaeologists and amateur historians have combed North America's east coast searching for traces of Viking visitors.

It has been a long, fruitless quest, littered with bizarre claims and embarrassing failures. But at a conference in Canada earlier this month, archaeologist Patricia Sutherland announced new evidence that points strongly to the discovery of the second Viking outpost ever discovered in the Americas.

While digging in the ruins of a centuries-old building on Baffin Island (map),
far above the Arctic Circle, a team led by Sutherland, adjunct
professor of archaeology at Memorial University in Newfoundland and a
research fellow at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, found some
very intriguing whetstones. Wear grooves in the blade-sharpening tools
bear traces of copper alloys such as bronze—materials known to have been
made by Viking metalsmiths but unknown among the Arctic's native
inhabitants.Read the rest of this article...

Votive offerings to Juno from 4th to 2nd century BC

Rome, October 19 - Investigations into the
activities of four tomb raiders in the Alban hills near Rome
have led to the discovery of a previously unknown site
containing ancient Roman votive offerings.
The ex-votos date from the fourth to the second century BC
and include life-sized statues and depictions of parts of the
human anatomy in terracotta offered to the ancient Roman goddess
Juno.
Police caught the tomb robbers in action as they were
stealing the devotional objects from a natural cavity in a tufa
wall near Lanuvio and Genzano that did not appear on
archaeological maps of the area.Read the rest of this article...

The carbon clock is getting reset.
Climate records from a Japanese lake are set to improve the accuracy of
the dating technique, which could help to shed light on archaeological
mysteries such as why Neanderthals became extinct.

Carbon dating is used to work out the age of organic
material — in effect, any living thing. The technique hinges on
carbon-14, a radioactive isotope of the element that, unlike other more
stable forms of carbon, decays away at a steady rate. Organisms capture a
certain amount of carbon-14 from the atmosphere when they are alive. By
measuring the ratio of the radio isotope to non-radioactive carbon, the
amount of carbon-14 decay can be worked out, thereby giving an age for
the specimen in question.

But that assumes that the amount of carbon-14 in the
atmosphere was constant — any variation would speed up or slow down the
clock. The clock was initially calibrated by dating objects of known age
such as Egyptian mummies and bread from Pompeii; work that won Willard
Libby the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But even he “realized that
there probably would be variation”, says Christopher Bronk Ramsey, a
geochronologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the latest
work, published today in Science1. Various geologic, atmospheric and solar processes can influence atmospheric carbon-14 levels.Read the rest of this article...

The ancient sundial dating from the Greco-Roman period found in Polichrono in Chalkidiki [Credit: Greek Reporter]

One of the rarest sundials dating from the Greco-Roman period was found in Polichrono in Chalkidiki, northern Greece.This sundial is not a usual one as it shows the correct time at any given place.

It is noteworthy that in the Ancient
Greek world, sundials consisted of a gnomon (indicator) in the form of a
vertical post or peg set in a flat surface, upon which the shadow of
the gnomon served to indicate the time.

This sundial has a surface which is
separated in 12 parts representing 12 hours of the day. More
particularly, the sundial consists of a hyperbola tracing the shadow’s
path at the winter solstice, a second one for the summer solstice, and a
straight east-west line in between marking the equinoctial shadows.Read the rest of this article...

Saturday, October 20, 2012

After 18 years, 20 series and more than 40 specials, Time Team will
air its final series on Channel 4 in 2013. Further one-off specials are
planned for at least into 2014 and the series will continue to be
repeated across both More4 and Channel 4.

Channel 4 will increase its focus on new and
innovative history programming; with new commissions with exclusive
access to archaeological discoveries including the recently announced
The King in the Carpark: Richard III and the brand new The People of
Stonehenge (w/t), The Hood (w/t) - as well Attack of the Zeppelins (w/t)
with Hugh Hunt.

Head of Factual Ralph Lee says: "I am incredibly
proud that, as well as providing hundreds of hours of education and
entertainment on Channel 4, Time Team has invested, over and above
production costs, more than £4m in archaeology in Britain over the past
18 years. Time Team will continue to be on our screens for at least a
further two years and we are discussing other ideas around archaeology
with Tim Taylor, Time Team's creator and the production team behind it.Read the rest of this article...

Friday, October 19, 2012

Professor Alice Roberts, one of the presenters of Prehistoric Autopsy (credit: BBC)

Professor Alice Roberts is back on our screens next week with Prehistoric Autopsy,
which sees a team of experts reconstructing some of our ancient
ancestors. We caught up with Alice to ask her about the three early
human relatives that will feature in the programme.

Lucy's species (Australopithecus Afarensis)

"Our closest living relatives – chimpanzees – stand on two legs. The
distinction is, are you a habitual biped? To get from A to B, is that
your locomotion of choice? If it is, that causes changes in your
anatomy. Lucy’s skeleton had these changes, and it’s very similar to our
skeletons."

"Another piece of evidence is the ‘Laetoli footprints’ from Tanzania. One expert on Prehistoric Autopsy
is Robin Crompton, who’s studied Lucy’s gait, primarily by analysing
the Laetoli footprints and how they represent stepping onto the ground –
compared with humans and chimpanzees. The way we form footprints
reflects the pressures applied at different points, because the whole of
your foot doesn’t hit the floor at the same time: pressure comes
through the heel, then down onto the ball and onto the toes. And when
Robin looks at Lucy’s footprint, it appears quite similar to the way we
walk."

A new series of radiocarbon measurements from Japan’s Lake Suigetsu
will give scientists a more accurate benchmark for dating materials,
especially for older objects, according to a research team that included
Oxford University’s Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.

The research team extracted cores of beautifully preserved layers of
sediment, containing organic material (such as tree leaf and twig
fossils), from the bottom of the Japanese lake where they had lain
undisturbed for tens of thousands of years. As an article in the journal
Science explains, the findings are hugely significant because
they provide a much more precise way to examine radiocarbon ages of
organic material for the entire 11,000-53,000-year time range. For
example, archaeologists should now be able to pinpoint more accurately
the timing of the extinction of Neanderthals or the spread of modern
humans into Europe.

At the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, Professor Christopher
Ramsey with his doctoral student Richard Staff and chemist Dr Fiona
Brock worked with two other radiocarbon laboratories (the NERC facility
at East Kilbride, Scotland, and Groningen in the Netherlands) on the
radiocarbon record from the lake. This research is part of a large
international research team, led by Professor Takeshi Nakagawa of
Newcastle University, studying the cores for clues about past climate
and environmental change.

An
aerial view of Rome: residents of the city are often underwhelmed and
sometimes irritated to find they are living on top of priceless Roman
remains. Photograph: Alessandro Bianchi/REUTERS

Rome may not exactly be short of catacombs, but one
discovered this week is more deserving of the name than the city's
countless other subterranean burial chambers. For Mirko Curti stumbled
into a 2,000-year-old tomb piled with bones while chasing a wayward
moggy yards from his apartment building.

Curti and a friend were
following the cat at 10pm on Tuesday when it scampered towards a low
tufa rock cliff close to his home near Via di Pietralata in a
residential area of the city. "The cat managed to get into a grotto and
we followed the sound of its miaowing," he said.

Inside the small
opening in the cliff the two men found themselves surrounded by niches
dug into the rock similar to those used by the Romans to hold funeral
urns, while what appeared to be human bones littered the floor.Read the rest of this article...

Sofia Mayor, Yordanka Fandakova, visited
archaeological works in the center of the city; the St. Joseph catholic
cathedral is seen behind. Photo by livenews.com

Archaeologists have discovered colorful floormosaic from the Roman era near the so-called West Gate of Serdica in downtown Sofia.

The news was announced Monday by the Mayor of Sofia, Yordanka Fandakova, who visited the archaeological excavations in the company of her Deputy in charge of Culture, Todor Chobanov.

The mosaic has an area of 40 square meters and is located in the ruins of a Roman building discovered for the first time between 1975 and 1980 when archaeologists began exploring the site. The works were later abandoned and remained unfinished.Read the rest of this article...

Alarmed at the looting of historically valuable shipwrecks in
the Baltic Sea, German archaeologists have started attaching underwater
signs designating them as protected monuments. Hobby divers and trophy
hunters are damaging a precious maritime legacy stretching back
thousands of years, they warn.

The two-man U-boat was discovered lying at a depth of 18 meters near
Boltenhagen off Germany's Baltic Sea coast in 2000. Its plexiglass
turret hatch was intact and closed, which prompted authorities to
designate it as a war grave because the crew of the vessel, of a type
used by the German navy towards the end of World War II to evade Allied
sonar detection and sink ships, was believed to still be inside. Read the rest of this article...

Alepotrypa
Cave was home to a Neolithic community more than 5,000 years ago. The
first archaeologist to dig inside unearthed hundreds of burials and
hypothesized that the cave was believed to be Hades, or the underworld
in Greek mythology.

A Field Museum curator is digging around a cave in Southern Greece
that’s been compared to the mythical underworld, Hades. That cave might
help explain why people choose to migrate to big cities or high tail it
to the suburbs.

And it has a surprising Chicago tie.

William
Parkinson is the associate curator of Eurasian anthropology at the
Field Museum. He is on a research team, called The Diros Project, made
up of two Greek and two American archaeologists (both Chicago natives).

They
are excavating Alepotrypa Cave, which is nearly four football fields
long. The researchers compare the most striking room in the cave to a
Cathedral.Read the rest of this article...

Monday, October 15, 2012

IF you ever wondered whether you are you descended from the Vikings or the Normans, now is the time to find out.

A network of academics led by Dr Catherine Swift of
Mary Immaculate College, and Dr Turi King of the Department of Genetics,
University of Leicester are using scientific techniques and the
traditional tools of the historian in an attempt to identify what
percentage of the Irish population are descended from Vikings.

Volunteers
with certain surnames - including English, Stokes and Noonan, amongst
many others - will be tested at Fennessey’s pub, New Street, Sunday,
October 21, at 12 noon.

Excavations at the ancient farm of Hjalmarvik are
providing detailed insights into the ways Icelanders
adapted to changing climatic conditions. (Zach Zorich)

Stefán Ólafsson of the Icelandic
Archaeological Institute
and Céline Dupont Hébert of
Laval University, Quebec City, are
the crew chiefs of a team of archaeologists
with the unglamorous job
of excavating a garbage dump at
Hjalmarvik, an ancient farm on the
northeastern coast of Iceland. Their
approximately 9-by-12-foot excavation
trench sits just outside what
was a sod-walled farmhouse that may
date back to the years shortly after
871, when Iceland was first settled
by groups of Vikings from Norway.
Today, the remains of the house are no
more than a flat spot on the ground
overlooking a small bay a few hundred
yards to the west. The excavation
of the garbage dump, or midden, is
revealing a detailed record of life at the
farm and provides clues to how its residents
handled the severe challenges
the island faced during an extended
period of climatic disruption.

The walls of the trench are striped
with orange peat ash, probably discarded
when the hearth inside the
house was cleaned. Although the crew
has uncovered interesting whalebone
carvings—some decorated with images
and others that were used as gaming
pieces—the most common items
found in the trench are the discarded
bones of the animals eaten by Hjalmarvik’s
residents. Laboratory analysis
of the bones has not yet begun,
but at first glance it looks like most of
the food they were eating came from the surrounding ocean.
Read the rest of this article...

In the first century A.D. Roman army veterans
arrived in what is now northern Macedonia and
settled near the small village of Scupi. The veterans
had been given the land by the emperor Domitian
as a reward for their service, as was customary. They
soon began to enlarge the site, and around A.D. 85,
the town was granted the status of a Roman colony and named
Colonia Flavia Scupinorum. (“Flavia” refers to the
Flavian Dynasty of which Domitian was a
member.) Over the next several centuries
Scupi grew at a rapid pace. In the late
third century and well into the fourth,
Scupi experienced a period of great
prosperity. The colony became the
area’s principal religious, cultural,
economic, and administrative center
and one of the locations from
which, through military action and
settlement, the Romans colonized
the region.

Scupi, which gives its name
to Skopje, the nearby capital of
the Republic of Macedonia, has
been excavated regularly since 1966. Since
that time archaeologists have uncovered an
impressive amount of evidence, including many
of the buildings that characterize a Roman city—
a theater, a basilica, public baths, a granary, and
a sumptuous urban villa, as well as remains of the city walls and part of the gridded
street plan. Recently, however, due
to the threat from construction,
they have focused their work on one
of the city’s necropolises, situated on
both sides of a 20-foot-wide state-of-the
art ancient road.Read the rest of this article...

Devon has one of the country's largest collections of medieval church bench carvings, a new study has revealed.

Historian Todd Gray, from Exeter, studied the ornate woodwork in more than 600 of the county's churches.

The carvings were mostly carried out by local craftsmen hundreds of years ago.The meaning behind many of the carvings is unknown, but some
of the designs were created specifically for members of congregations.

Other sites include Taylor's Bell Foundry in Loughborough and the Chapel of St John the Baptist in Derbyshire.

English Heritage (EH) has included Grade II listed buildings for the first time in a bid to attract support.It said being on the list meant a greater chance of securing grants.Read the rest of this article...

Scientists and archeologists at the University of Huddersfield
harness modern technology to learn about the weapons and ammunition on
board Tudor battleship Mary Rose, dramatically raised back to the
surface 30 years ago

THIRTY years ago – on 11 October 1982 – the Tudor warship Mary Rose
was dramatically raised to the surface, more than four centuries after
she sank accidentally during an engagement with the French fleet in
1545. But after three decades of research into the ship and its
contents, there is still much that can be learned, especially by the
application of new technology, and this is exactly what is happening at
the University of Huddersfield, in collaboration with The Mary Rose
Trust.

The University is home both to the International Institute for
Accelerator Applications and an Arms and Armour Research Group. Their
combined expertise is leading to new discoveries about the weaponry and
ammunition on board the Henry VIII’s flagship.Read the rest of this article...

One of the first atomic bomb stores built in England has joined a
bell foundry, a fairground rollercoaster and a tumble of stones which
may once have been a monks' kitchen among more than 5,800 important
listed buildings and structures which appear on the latest English Heritage at-risk register.

Although
thousands of buildings have been rescued since the register was first
launched in 1998, the list is growing faster than buildings are being
saved, a situation worsened by government cuts to English Heritage's
funding. In the past year, 318 sites have been saved and removed from
the register, but 360 new sites have been added.

Producer Beaty Rubens introduces a
new, extended series of The Essay on Radio 3 – three blocks of ten
episodes stretching in to 2013, the first series beginning on Monday
15th October.

I was interested in the Anglo-Saxons –
that wasn’t the problem. In fact, I had attended a primary school
called King Alfred’s, and even today could sketch you the school logo
– a wonky little line drawing of Alfred, seated on a throne, wearing a
sort of Anglo-Saxon dress and pointy shoes and holding up a book to show
off his passion for education. Which is ironic, really, because
education – or my lack of it – on the subject was exactly why I felt so
unqualified to produce a 30-part series called Anglo-Saxon Portraits.

I knew something about the Celts and the Romans and the
Tudors, but the half millennium between the departure of the Romans and
the arrival of the Normans was a shocking blank. Perhaps the
Anglo-Saxons just weren’t much taught in the 50 years after the War,
when the idea of Aryan and Germanic invaders wasn’t all that
fashionable. Read the rest of this article...

Alexander IV was born to Roxana after Alexander the Great’s death in
323 BCE. They died, poisoned, in a power struggle in 310 BCE when
Alexander IV was about 12. Some histories claim that Roxana and
Alexander IV had been expelled to Greek Macedonia after the conqueror’s
death.

There has been a previous claim for the finding of their tomb, at the Vergina site in northern Greece in the 1970s.

An archaeological watching brief placed by the Dartmoor National Park Authority (DNPA) on a development being carried out within the grounds of St Mary’s School, Buckfast has uncovered some of the area's medieval past.

The watching brief condition, which is a standard part of the planning procedure, was requested by DNPA archaeologist Jane Marchand because the area involved lay within the outer court of medieval Buckfast Abbey, and therefore could be sensitive archaeologically.

The work involving the creation of a new playground revealed a large rock-cut ditch which formed part of the boundary of this 13th-century outer court. A continuation of the boundary ditch had already been revealed in the 1980s when the present road was cut a little to the north of the site.Read the rest of this article...

Like some other Neanderthals, "Wilma," a DNA-based reconstruction, was red-headed, freckled, and fair.

The Neanderthals are both the most familiar and the least understood of all our fossil kin.

For decades after the initial discovery of their bones in a cave in Germany in 1856 Homo neanderthalensis
was viewed as a hairy brute who stumbled around Ice Age Eurasia on bent
knees, eventually to be replaced by elegant, upright Cro-Magnon, the
true ancestor of modern Europeans.

Science has long since killed
off the notion of that witless caveman, but Neanderthals have still been
regarded as quintessential losers—a large-brained, well-adapted species
of human that went extinct nevertheless, yielding the Eurasian
continent to anatomically modern humans, who began to migrate out of
Africa some 60,000 years ago.

Archaeologists
began new excavations at the medieval Urvich fortress 20km from
Bulgaria’s capital city Sofia at the beginning of October 2012, with the
first finds including silver rings, earrings and bronze and iron
personal items, Bulgarian archaeology professor Nikolai Ovcharov said.

Urvich fortress is near the banks of the Iskar River in the Pancharevo area close to the road from Sofia to Samokov.

The fortress is estimated to date from the 13th century CE, during the time of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom.

A concrete structure of three meters wide and over two meters high,
placed by order of Augustus (adoptive son and successor of Julius
Caesar) to condemn the assassination of his father, has given the key to
the scientists. This finding confirms that the General was stabbed
right at the bottom of the Curia of Pompey while he was presiding,
sitting on a chair, over a meeting of the Senate. Currently, the remains
of this building are located in the archaeological area of Torre
Argentina, right in the historic centre of the Roman capital.

Antonio Monterroso, CSIC researcher from the Institute of History
of the Center for Humanities and Social Sciences (CCHS-CSIC), states:
"We always knew that Julius Caesar was killed in the Curia of Pompey on
March 15th 44 BC because the classical texts pass on so, but so far no
material evidence of this fact, so often depicted in historicist
painting and cinema, had been recovered".

Classical sources refer to the closure (years after the murder)
of the Curia, a place that would become a chapel-memory. CSIC researcher
explains: "We know for sure that the place where Julius Caesar presided
over that session of the Senate, and where he fell stabbed, was closed
with a rectangular structure organized under four walls delimiting a
Roman concrete filling. However, we don't know if this closure also
involved that the building ceased to be totally accessible".
Read the rest of this article...

Europe’s oldest urban settlement is near Provadia, a town of about
13 000 people about 40km inland from Bulgaria’s Black Sea city of Varna,
according to archaeology Professor Vassil Nikolov, citing evidence from
work done at the Provadia – Solnitsata archaeological site in summer
2012.

The team of archaeologists headed by Nikolov excavated stone walls
estimated to date from 4700 to 4200 BCE. The walls are two metres thick
and three metres high, and according to Nikolov are the earliest and
most massive fortifications from Europe’s pre-history.

There were about 300 to 350 people living at the site in those
times, living in two-storey houses and earning their living by salt
mining.

To this day, Provadia is an important salt centre, with a
large-scale foreign investor represented in the area. Estimates are that
salt has been extracted in the area for about 7500.

The Greek statues have not been seen in public since 2008 while
museum renovation is mired in controversy [Credit: The Art Newspaper]

When
two large bronze sculptures dating back to the fifth century BC were
hauled out of the sea just off the coast of Calabria almost 40 years
ago, the Italian authorities and international academics were quick to
recognise it as one of the most important archeological discoveries of
the century. Yet today these extraordinary finds are languishing on
stretchers in a regional government office in Reggio Calabria and it is
unclear when they will be put back on display.

The
sculptures, known as the Riace Bronzes after the nearest town on the
coast to their findspot, are one of the few surviving examples of
bronzes made by the master sculptors of ancient Greece (most sculptures
of this age were melted down and the bronze re-used). After they were
found by divers, they were taken to Florence’s Opificio delle Pietre
Dure to be restored. They were exhibited in 1980 at the Museo
Archeologico Nazionale in Florence, where they were seen by 1.3 million
people. They then travelled through Italy, via Rome, back to Calabria
for display in Reggio Calabria’s archaeology museum, which claimed the
works as its own. They remained there until 2009, when the museum was
closed for renovation, and were transferred to the council offices.Read the rest of this article...

Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Drive west from Orkney’s capital, Kirkwall, and then head north on
the narrow B9055 and you will reach a single stone monolith that guards
the entrance to a spit of land known as the Ness of Brodgar. The
promontory separates the island’s two largest bodies of freshwater, the
Loch of Stenness and the Loch of Harray. At their furthest edges, the
lochs’ peaty brown water laps against fields and hills that form a
natural amphitheatre; a landscape peppered with giant rings of stone,
chambered cairns, ancient villages and other archaeological riches.

This is the heartland of the Neolithic North, a bleak, mysterious
place that has made Orkney a magnet for archaeologists, historians and
other researchers. For decades they have tramped the island measuring
and ex- cavating its great Stone Age sites. The land was surveyed,
mapped and known until a recent chance discovery revealed that for all
their attention, scientists had completely overlooked a Neolithic
treasure that utterly eclipses all others on Orkney – and in the rest of
Europe.

This is the temple complex of the Ness of Brodgar, and its size,
complexity and sophistication have left archaeologists desperately
struggling to find superlatives to describe the wonders they found
there. “We have discovered a Neolithic temple complex that is without
parallel in western Europe. Yet for decades we thought it was just a
hill made of glacial moraine,” says discoverer Nick Card of the Orkney
Research Centre for Archaeology. “In fact the place is entirely manmade,
although it covers more than six acres of land.”Read the rest of this article...

Two
ancient Roman shipwrecks, complete with their cargo, have been
discovered by Italian archaeologists off the coast of Turkey near the
the ancient Roman city of Elaiussa Sebaste.

The
ships, one dating from the Roman Imperial period and the other from
about the sixth century AD, have been found with cargoes of amphorae and
marble, say researchers from the Italian Archaeological Mission of
Rome's University La Sapienza.

Both
ships were discovered near Elaiussa Sebaste, on the Aegean coast of
Turkey near Mersin, according to a statement issued by the Italian
embassy in Ankara.Read the rest of this article...

Most detailed analysis yet of prehistoric stone circle shows how masons spent more time making key areas look the best

Stonehenge:
a digital laser scan has revealed tool marks from 4,500 years ago, and
graffiti made by Victorian visitors. Photograph: Yoshihiro Takada/Corbis

Like any corner-cutting modern builder, the ancient stonemasons who built Stonehenge
lavished the most work and best materials where they would be first
seen –shining in the last light of the setting winter solstice sun, or
at dawn on the longest day.

The first complete 3D laser scan of
the stone circle has also revealed tool marks made 4,500 years ago,
scores of little axehead graffiti added when the enormous slabs were
already 1,000 years old, and damage and graffiti contributed by Georgian
and Victorian visitors.

The survey, carried out for English Heritage,
exposes numerous details now invisible to the naked eye and will be
used in displays for the long-awaited new visitor centre, due to open
late next year. It shows the stones in unprecedented precision,
from the double-decker bus height sarsens from Salisbury Plain that
give the monument its unmistakable profile, to the smaller bluestones
brought from west Wales by means still hotly debated, and the stumps of
stones that have almost been destroyed.Read the rest of this article...

Monday, October 08, 2012

The lost crown of Henry VIII has been recreated in minute detail,
down to the last pearl and thumbnail-sized enamelled sculpture, almost
400 years after the original was melted down along with every scrap of
royal regalia Cromwell's government could lay its hands on.

The crown will be exhibited at Hampton Court Palace,
where Henry wore the original on great occasions of state and church.
It will be displayed in the royal pew of the Chapel Royal, which reopens
this month after seven years of restoration work.

The crown may
have been made for Henry's father, Henry VII, and was used in the
coronations of his children Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, and then of
James I and Charles I. By then it was a sacred object: a portrait by
Daniel Mytens in 1631 – now in the National Portrait Gallery,
and crucial evidence for the historians who pored over every surviving
image and account – shows Charles I standing bare-headed by a
velvet-draped table, on which the crown is shown in scrupulous detail.Read the rest of this article...

A project that will reveal thousands of years of Northamptonshire’s
archaeology and heritage has taken a major step forward following an
announcement by the Heritage Lottery Fund today.

The Chester Farm project has been successful in securing a grant of
£135,800 development funding, the initial support for a £4.1m HLF bid,
following an application submitted by Northamptonshire County Council.

The project aims to open up the county council-owned site to the
public so that everyone can benefit and learn from this hugely
significant historical and archaeological site.

The initial funding will enable detailed development work to be
undertaken. This will include comprehensive planning for the approach to
interpretation of the site, including the innovative use of IT,
together with an education and learning activities plan.

It will also fund a study into the feasibility of locating a
countywide archaeological archives store and public access point on the
site.Read the rest of this article...

About Me

I am a freelance archaeologist and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland specializing in the medieval period. I have worked as a field archaeologist for the Department of Environment (Northern Ireland) and the Museum of London. I have been involved in continuing education for many years and have taught for the University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education (OUDCE) and the Universities of London, Essex, Ulster, and the London College of the University of Notre Dame, and I was the Archaeological Consultant for Southwark Cathedral. I am the author of and tutor for an OUDCE online course on the Vikings, and the Programme Director and Academic Director for the Oxford Experience Summer School.